Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures

by L.H. Stallings

Funk. It is multisensory and multidimensional philosophy used in conjunction with the erotic, eroticism, and black erotica. It is the affect that shapes film, performance, sound, food, technology, drugs, energy, time, and the seeds of revolutionary ideas for black movements. But funk is also an experience to feel, to hear, to touch and taste, and in Funk the Erotic, L. H. Stallings uses funk in all its iterations as an innovation in black studies.

Stallings uses funk to highlight the importance of the erotic and eroticism in Black cultural and political movements, debunking "the truth of sex" and its histories. Brandishing funk as a theoretical tool, Stallings argues that Western theories of the erotic fail as universally applicable terms or philosophies, and thus lack utility in discussions of black bodies, subjects, and culture. In considering the Victorian concept of freak in black funk, Stallings proposes that black artists across all media have fashioned a tradition that embraces the superfreak, sexual guerrilla, sexual magic, mama's porn, black trans narratives, and sex work in a post-human subject position. Their goal: to ensure survival and evolution in a world that exploits black bodies in capitalist endeavors, imperialism, and colonization.

Revitalizing and wide-ranging, Funk the Erotic offers a needed examination of black sexual cultures, a discursive evolution of black ideas about eroticism, a critique of work society, a reexamination of love, and an articulation of the body in black movements.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, Sexuality, Theory, Queer, Gender Studies, Gender

296 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 12, 2015

Reviews

[i. · Rating 5 out of 5]

L.H. Stallings describes funk as: “…a philosophy about kinesthetics and being that critiques capitalism and the pathology of the Western morality of the West while also possessing the wisdom to know and understand that the two are linked….I am examining funk as nonreproducive sex and transaesthetics of cultural art forms” (3). Stallings’ theorization of funk and superfreaks helps to not only push against Western modes of sexual and labor domination, but also works to bring the sacred back to sexuality, in ways that do not fall into Puritanical metaphysics, and, in fact, push against such metaphysics as a matter of survivance.

[Laurel Schuster · Rating 5 out of 5]

so fun. was assigned one chapter for class on Black queer diaspora and ended up reading the whole thing.

[Charlie Stetson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense! But such an interesting read

[Hollis]

This is one of the most exciting and generative scholarly monographs I've read in some time. Stallings gives an impressive survey of the nature of Black sexual cultures with special attention to transsexualities, freak subcultures (in funk music, freak shows, and more broad contexts), and sex work. Her points of reference are incredibly varied, giving nods to philosophers of orgies, nineteenth-century Afro-Asiatic approaches to sexual spirituality, and recent documentaries like Leilah Weinraub's Shakedown. I especially appreciated reading her claims on Black sexual expression as a 'site of profane memory' troubling normative distinctions of public/private and work/leisure. This book adds enormously to recent, intersectional thinking on class- and race-based investments in the popular representation of sexualities.

[Mills College Library]

306.70899 H8236 2015